PROJECT: Clearance
by Silver Queen's Goldfinch
Summary: Katarina left her position as lieutenant of the G/NETIC-rebels, returning to the Command-Line of PROJECT. Have you ever wondered why? (Rated T to be safe. Warnings: mentions of both voluntary and forced body-augmentations.)


_I really wished/ expected/ hoped there to be a PROJECT: Talon-skin._

_For one simple reason: there has to be a reason Katarina abandoned her position as lieutenant of G/NETIC._

_Sooooo I might have gotten a little hyped and produced this little one-shot. Feel free to tell me if you would like me to expand on this universe. For now and until Steps Measured is finished, this will stay a one-shot._

_As always, feedback is highly appreciated 3 _

* * *

Red light blinked in sync with the soundless taps of her neuro-attached footcasings, the bioengineered material stretching with each of her steps, feeding information about the ground structure and the temperature into her limbic system. Subtle vibrations tickling her toes first informed her about two heavy brass-rats right in front of her. To evade them, she slunk into the shadows of another corridor.

This one was empty, only the cold smell of steel and sharp cleaner reached her olfactory system, one of the few organs still originating from the body she had been born with. The path kinked in front of her and she wordlessly commanded the soles of her boots to change their texture. With an elegant swirl of her still-lithe body, she jumped, her headgear automatically taming the mass of her white hair. The anti-gravity modules in her gloves and belt hummed to life as she placed the flat of her hand against metal struts crisscrossing over the ceiling. The air vents were much too occupied by cleaning and spying bots, impossible even for her to climb through undetected, but nobody expected an assault like hers. Nobody ever did, not even her employers to which she had returned half a year ago, her proverbial tail tucked in between her legs. Disgraced, once more, turning her back to the allies she had made during her short but fierce fight against PROJECT.

More vibrations titillated her neuronal feed – this hallway was not as unoccupied as she had hoped. On the other hand, sentinels never occupied insignificant hubs.

Two massive heaps of metal rolled into her field of vision, their shiny carapaces moving in perfect sync.

Like a Ting-Spider, she crawled right above the brass-rats, ready to conquer what they guarded - the hallway and a door it led to. Soundlessly, she switched off her anti-gravity modules and dropped to the floor, activating the neuronal jammer her support had matched to the wavelength of the guards behind her. The timer in her visor set as soon as the device activated, the blinking numbers informing her of the four minutes and twelve seconds the parasitic signal would work.

Nothing apparent changed, but Katarina could not be too sure. Her tech had supported her for years, had kept the contact even as she had left PROJECT to join the G/NETIC rebels. Said tech, who managed to pass Nami's mandatory psych evaluations, was one of the last remnants of Katarina's father in this company, which did not free her from the suspect Katarina's programming subjugated each- and everyone to. On closer inspection, her having passed those tests did not increase her credibility.

Katarina kept her breath even and pressed her key-card through the door's reader, infecting its closing mechanism with an intricately written virus. The assassin had to force herself not to act as the seconds in her timer ticked down four times. As long the virus would need to mask the door's opening and spread to the cameras inside the room, setting a loop of the past five minutes. The metal barrier slid aside and, true to the tech-girl's promise, the brass-rats made no move to turn, to arrest her, to send the whole hell of PROJECT onto her heels. Katarina silently thanked and cursed her personal hacker while slipping through the opening, into the dimly lit room. It was a lab, deserted by this time of the night, only the blinking red of machinery and subtle green of the illuminated aug-tank in the corner lightening her way. Instantly, her face-shield adapted, pitching to infrared-sight.

A patch of dark green, the promise of heat, lured her to the far corner of the room. She had to be fast now. This was neither the first lab she had raided over the past months nor the first one she had found occupied and, as much as she hated to admit it even to herself, the rational part of her code had downrated the chances of her success with every past failure.

Overwriting those negative thoughts, she stepped toward the aug-tank, assessing the white hair wafting in the green vita-gel like algae inside a clear pond. Slowly, a face solidified inside the goo, the facial structures becoming more visible with every step she hazarded forward.

Her heart-rate picked up as her memory-drive frizzed to life, trying to bombard her with a thousand visual references. Her stomach churned as if she had been kicked and Katarina was not sure if the sudden flare of her brain was the only reason for that feeling.

The calm face visible between long strands of white was estranged by metal replacing the right side, seamlessly melting into the flesh that still made out half of a too-calm face. It was a man, his age nearly indeterminable due to the augments made to body and face. Meanwhile, Katarina's heart pounded like in battle, her advanced augments instantly powering up in preparation for a fight before she willed her scripts into action, relieving her of the sudden adrenalin-flood.

Her hand spread out over the glass right in front of his face. Searching for confirmation. After all the time she had spent here, fighting against her old allies, against G/NETIC, for the monsters of PROJECT who had taken each and every important person out of her life, _could it possibly be… _

"Talon?" Katarina whispered and tapped her knuckles against the glass, like someone trying to incite fish in an aquarium.

As expected, only silence answered her, and Katarina assessed the man's state. The greater part of his skin had been replaced, his right arm looked bulkier than she remembered, with an interface she imagined to act as a connector for his preferred weapon. A quick scan of the room revealed a clinically tidy workbench and the source of the soft red glow illuminating the room. A plasma shift-blade, one of those weapons her brother would have had a hard time hiding his excitement over. One of those weapons he would steal and kill for, one he would fight and kill with.

A part of the female assassin, long thought buried and dead, awoke with a rumble just before her failsafe kicked in and overwrote the hindering emotions with the calmness she needed on a mission. She turned her face back to the tank, and froze.

Red eyes stared back at her.

Not those she had grown up with, but Katarina herself had given up her inferior sight as she had gained her first enhancements. Still, for a moment she was glad about the red hue illuminating his face, no one had dared to change this part of his natural coloring. The man's head twitched and his eyes narrowed, seemingly switching to infrared-sight as well. Katarina was back against the glass in an instant, pressing her hands against the warm surface. She had less than two minutes left before the brass-rat's neuronal signals would be changing and her jamming device would become useless.

"I came for you," Katarina whispered, counting on the advanced senses he had most likely received. "You better pull through this, otherwise I will dispose of you with the other electronic scrap, get it?"

His arm, connected to the ever-present vita-sensors, lifted and a hand, coated in dark synthetic skin, wafted through the gel he was confided in, until the tips of his fingers touched the glass. Right where her digits pressed against the hard glass. Katarina felt a burning behind her eyes and she suddenly worried about her mechanics, feared her optic sensors would malfunction at the worst of times.

"I am here. I came back for you. I do not allow you to forget. Remember me, don't you dare to break! _Don't _let them in!" Katarina rushed out and, before the tingling in her head could grow to a major glitch, she pulled away, scanning the room. Her virus should have checked out the medical file of the specimen contained in here, along with downloading a backup-file of his medical data and memory. She was overextending her welcome. One last glance back showed bubbles, lazily drafting from her brother's opening mouth to the surface. She might not recognize parts of his now-mechanized face, but she remembered the forming line in between his eyes, even though the gesture was weaker than she remembered. She wanted to stay, wanted to shatter the glass and take him away with her, drag him to safety where no one would try to mess with his brain. Her automatic assessment filed those thoughts as most likely self-harming and locked them away before she was able to follow through. She was also reminded that nowhere was safe. Instead, she assessed this to be time to get away.

Silent as a shadow, she slid through the still half-open door and pulled her key-card out of the slit. Following a sudden glitch, she looked back at Talon's eyes, a red hue in the green he was suspended in. The red light shone at her until the door shut soundlessly, leaving behind the man she had spent a whole year searching for.

The fibers of her enhanced muscles tensed as she jumped up, latching on the metal tiles of the ceiling. Her jammer sent a small vibration through the neuro-link, telling her it had expired. Nothing changed, the brass-rats under her continued their duties as if she had never been there. The burning behind Katarina's eyes stayed, nearly forcing her lips to curl back over her teeth in a snarl. She would need to visit her tech sooner rather than later, both for evaluation of her optics as well as to present her findings, to read out the key-card's memory.

Finally, she had made it.

She had found him, the sole reason for her return to PROJECT.

Katarina had always known him to be alive. Right after he had vanished to search for their father, she had _known_ about his captors. She had tried fighting them from the other side, had expected them to first erase Talon's slate, then sent him as a part of the Command-Line. She had expected him to appear, without memories, trying to kill her – in that scenario, she had planned to rip him free of his captors. His skills were valued too highly, he was too great an asset as to not try to wipe his memory-drive clean just one more time.

Contrary to what she had expected, Talon had never been sent after her. After a significant latency, she had returned to the laboratories that had slowly chopped away her humanity, another certainty burning inside her circuits. If he was still put under, if he had not been released to work, they had been unsuccessful in their tries to cleanse him.

One year down here, and Katarina was left with an insignificant, tiny amount of something she had ridiculed in front of Talon's face a few years prior, something she would deny harboring in front of anyone, even in front of herself.

_Hope_ had led her back and was now, once more, everything she could hold on to. Hope that he was still _there_, inside, waiting for her. That a part of him had prevailed. That they had not killed him yet, not bereft him of what made him her brother. Him being in a lab and not on a mission left too much room for the uncomfortable clenching in her chest_. _

_Just a little longer_, Katarina silently prayed to the figure she had left behind in the tank_. I came back for you, and now I will get us both out of this. Hold on just a little bit longer. _


End file.
